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Productivity detective work – solving mysterious delays

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I love this as just a riveting little story but it is also terribly absorbing about productivity and our perception of that too. A New York restaurant has been getting bad reviews that centre on how service there is slow. The owners can’t see what could be causing these – so they looked into it.

We decided to hire a firm to help us solve this mystery, and naturally the first thing they blamed it on was that the employees need more training and that maybe the kitchen staff is just not up to the task of serving that many customers.

Like most restaurants in NYC we have a surveillance system, and unlike today where it’s a digital system, 10 years ago we still used special high capacity tapes to record all activity. At any given time we had 4 special Sony systems recording multiple cameras. We would store the footage for 90 days just in case we need it for something.

The firm we hired suggested we locate some of the older tapes and analyze how the staff behaved 10 years ago versus how they behave now. We went down to our storage room but we couldn’t find any tapes at all.

We did find the recording devices, and luckily for us, each device has 1 tape in it that we simply never removed when we upgraded to the new digital system.

The date stamp on the old footage was Thursday July 1 2004, the restaurant was real busy that day. We loaded up the footage on a large size monitor, and next to it on a separate monitor loaded up the footage of Thursday July 3 2014, the amount of customers where only a bit more than 10 years prior.

Busy NYC Restaurant Solves Major Mystery by Reviewing Old Surveillance – Dineability (undated, probably 12 July 2014)

You will love what they found and what it means. Now, I’d like to direct you to the original post, an entry on Craigslist, but that’s vanished. This article on Dineability includes the full text plus a little stream of comments afterwards, some of which make you hope aliens never learn how thick we really are.

Scratchbuilding your perfect steampunk keyboard

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Hey, if it helps you write, I’m all for it. And I am always up for spending a little time now in order to save a lot later or just to make that later time more productive, more useful, more fun. I’m not sure this fits those, but what I lack in patience to do the work, I make up for in fancying the end result.

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My goal with this project was to build a retro keyboard that was fully functional and of a sufficient quality that it could be used everyday by a touch typist. In order to achieve this I chose a high quality (though widely available) keyboard as my starting point. This is an IBM Model M “Clicky” keyboard. They were made starting in the mid 1980’s and a version is still manufactured today. This particular keyboard was made in 1989 and shipped with and IBM PowerStation 530, a UNIX box the size of a kegerator.

Besides its overall quality and heft, one of the things that makes this keyboard particularly good for such a mod is the fact that it has removable key caps and the under-cap has a flat surface ideal for affixing a new key top.

Steampunk Keyboard Mod – Jake von Slatt, The Steampunk Workshop (8 July 2009)

Even if you’re no more likely to build this yourself than I am, do go take a gawp at the full feature: it has detailed photos, many videos and so much love that you can’t resist.

Ritot – the world’s first projection watch

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This is another Indiegogo crowdfunding product but it’s done, it’s passed its threshold and will be produced. Ritot is a projection watch, reportedly the first such thing, but it’s easier to show you. Have a watch, so to speak:

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For some reason it reminds me of my very first digital watch where you had to hold down a button to see some red LED readout. The watch band for this is rather nicer than those but still, I’m not sold.

Plenty of other people are, though, so if this is your bag, go pledge on Indiegogo to get it early or cheaper or with some rewards.

Update: Uiee portable power charger

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Previously… Uiee is a small and cute and colourful battery charger for iPhone and other devices that’s currently well worth your attention on IndieGoGo. I told you upfront that I want one myself, but these chargers don’t last forever and I wondered about how long this would stay useful. My own current battery charger has radically reduced its ability to top up my iPhone, for instance.

You can’t expect a brand new product to have years of usage data but I asked the makers and they told me:

Uiee is built with top range circuit board components, Uiee is expected to hold its charging capacity for at least 5 years as we will be using Samsung battery supplies giving a substantial life.

I also asked about the name:

With regards to the name Uiee, when starting the company, the owners wanted to start something that would take away the fear that most people seem to have when it comes to technology. Uiee came about while searching for a word that felt simple, friendly and warm to say. Uiee is more like a companion than a product.

Do go check out the IndieGoGo page for Uiee.

Ex-WiFi engineer fixes your problems

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Er, with wifi. Alf Watt, ex-Apple engineer, has been speaking specifically about wifi issues, he’s not left the company to become an agony aunt. Mind you, if you’ve ever hung out of a hotel window trying to get a signal, you’d take anything.

He spoke with The Mac Observer and really spoke: they’ve done a podcast interview that goes into a lot of detail. But the MO site also includes a breakout description of the most useful points, including screenshots for those of us who don’t spend a lot of time deep in Wifi dialog boxes.

Have a mug of tea and a read.

The world is a good place when there are people like this in it

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It just made me happy. A guy by the name of Zack Danger Brown – you know what he says to everybody about his middle name – launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his making a potato salad. His stated goal was to raise $10 (£5.85) and as of this moment, with 22 days left to go, he has got 5,660 backers contributing a total of $46,052 (£26,873.46).

The page’s description just keeps tickling me:

We’re making a lot of great progress. I think it’s time for us to think about getting hats made. I added a new donor level for people who want hats.

And he made a stretch goal – long since beaten – where he says:

$1000: I’ll do a live stream of the potato salad making

Go take a look and back this vital work on Kickstarter.

Remote control fertility

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Naturally, it’s remote control fertility for women. There’s no word of men looking for an app to control their – anyway, it’s a combination of an implanted device and activated by the woman.

There’s a story for you right there. Wait a second, I’m getting ahead of myself. What’s been reported is this:

The hunt for a perfect contraceptive has gone on for millennia. A new candidate is now on the horizon: a wireless implant that can be turned on and off with a remote control and that is designed to last up to 16 years. If it passes safety and efficacy tests, the device would be more convenient for many women because, unlike existing contraceptive implants, it can be deactivated without a trip to the clinic and an outpatient procedure, and it would last nearly half their reproductive life.

Developed by MicroCHIPS of Lexington, Massachusetts, the device will begin pre-clinical testing next year in the U.S. The goal is to have it on the market by 2018.

The device measures 20 x 20 x 7 millimeters, and it is designed to be implanted under the skin of the buttocks, upper arm, or abdomen. It dispenses 30 micrograms a day of levonorgestrel, a hormone already used in several kinds of contraceptives. Sixteen years’ worth of the hormone fits in tiny reservoirs on a microchip 1.5 centimeters wide inside the device. MicroCHIPS invented a hermetic titanium and platinum seal on the reservoirs containing the levonorgestrel. Passing an electric current through the seal from an internal battery melts it temporarily, allowing a small dose of the hormone to diffuse out each day.

A startup has developed a contraceptive chip that could be deactivated and reactivated using a wireless remote – Gwen Kinkead, Technnology Review (4 July 2014)

This is being backed by Bill and Melinda Gates so my first thought was that at the moment of, well, um, you’d get something like this:

windows 95 was designed here

But now I can’t get the idea of that wireless code out of my head. What if you weren’t the only person to know it? What if it were in some way hackable?

Read more at Technology Review and hat tip to Time magazine for spotting it.

In this week’s newsletter – July 11, 2014

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It used to be that if I wanted to tell you something, I’d wave my arms around a lot. Now I produced videos. So this week’s email newsletter includes one brand new, fresh baked this morning, video about a particularly good habit to get into with your own emails. If you don’t know this, you will now and you’ll use it every time.

And then there’s the equally freshly baked but made from six years of ingredients: how my own beloved iPhone home screen has changed over the years and as apps have become more ingrained in my life.

Plus remote control fertility – I don’t comment, I merely report – plus how exactly we writers should invoice for our work and I finally did some work this week.

Read this week’s free newsletter now – and then go get it sent to you automatically every week.